The Real and Elsewhere: Films of Ben Rivers

Join us at e-flux Screening Room for The Real and Elsewhere: Films of Ben Rivers, a screening of selected works by Ben Rivers, followed by an in-person discussion with the artist.

A formative figure in contemporary experimental cinema, Rivers in his films merges ethnographic observation, speculative world-building, and avant-garde storytelling. His work challenges the conventions of documentary, creating cinematic spaces where landscapes and characters exist on the peripheries—of society, of history, of what is known. Rivers’ films frequently take place in remote locations and imagined futures, investigating modes of survival, autonomy, and the boundaries between human and non-human perspectives.

This program brings together a selection of Rivers’ films that exemplify his engagement with speculative ethnography, science fiction, and the intersections of mythology and landscape. Through these works, Rivers reconfigures the documentary form, not as a means of capturing reality, but as a possibility for envisioning new ways of seeing and inhabiting the world.

Films
Slow Action (2010, 45 minutes)
Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film which exists somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Earth in the distant future, when the sea level has risen to absurd heights forming new isolated islands and archipelagos. Two narrators read accounts from a great library of Utopias, describing the four islands seen in the film.

The Shape of Things (2016, 2 minutes)
“It is always hard like this, not having a world, to imagine one, to go to the far edge apart and imagine, to wall whether in or out, to build a kind of cage for the sake of feeling the bars around us, to give shape to a world. And oh, it is always a world and not the world.” – William Bronk

There Is a Happy Land Further Awaay (2015, 20 minutes)
The film captures the landscapes of the remote volcanic Republic of Vanuatu archipelago, before they were devastated by Cyclone Pam in early 2015, the footage becoming a ghostly document of an ecosystem now irrevocably altered. A hesitant female voice reads a poem by Henri Michaux, recounting a life lived in a distant land, full of faltering and mistakes. Island imagery of active volcanoes, underwater WWII debris, children playing, and wrecked boats transform into intangible digital recollections of the island, made on the opposite side of the world. Images of the eroded land merge with eroding film, a lone figure on a boat drifts at sea.

Ijen, London (2006, 7 minutes)
A post-apocalyptic landscape of rocks and toxic fumes; devoid of human presence but not of life. On the soundtrack, we hear Herbert Read’s reading of his poem The Autumn of the World which contemplates a devastated world of chaos and decay, “blood-flecked clouds” and “vermilioned vastness”. A contemporary of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Read served in the western front during the First World War—an experience that would shape and haunt his writing.

The Coming Race (2006, 5 minutes)
A film in which thousands of people climb a rocky mountain terrain. The destination and purpose of their ascension remains unclear. A vague, mysterious and unsettling pilgrimage fraught with unknown intentions. The title The Coming Race is after a Victorian novel by E.G.E. Bulwer-Lytton, published in 1870, concerning a subterranean super-race who live under a mountain—which at the time was considered by some to be a work of fact.

Bio

Ben Rivers (b. 1972, Somerset, UK) is a London-based artist and filmmaker whose work explores the boundaries between documentary and fiction, often centering on individuals or communities living in remote landscapes. A graduate of Falmouth School of Art, Rivers developed his distinct approach through a self-taught engagement with 16mm film, crafting a practice rooted in materiality and process. His films have been exhibited at major international festivals and art institutions, including the Venice Film Festival (where he won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize), the Berlinale, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Locarno Film Festival. Rivers has had solo exhibitions at Jeu de Paume (Paris), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo), and Camden Arts Centre (London), among others. His works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate; Centre Pompidou; and the British Film Institute.

For more information, please contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

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